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How to disable “- Shortcut” text for shortcuts in Windows 10

Every time you create a new shortcut, Windows 10 appends the "- Shortcut" text to its name. e.g. the shortcut for totalcmd.exe becomes named "totalcmd.exe - Shortcut". It is possible to disable the "- Shortcut" suffix for any shortcuts you create after disabling it. Let's see how it can be done.

Before you proceed: Here is an alternative and a more flexible Registry tweak. It will allow you to not only disable the " - Shortcut" suffix, but also to replace it with any desired text or even append some text as a prefix. Read the following article:

To disable the "- Shortcut" text for shortcuts in Windows 10, you need to apply a simple Registry tweak. For those who would like to avoid manual Registry editing, I made ready-to-use Registry files. You can download those files below (the undo file is included):

About Sergey Tkachenko

Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer from Russia who started Winaero back in 2011. On this blog, Sergey is writing about everything connected to Microsoft, Windows and popular software. Follow him on Facebook, Twitter or Google+.

The “Download Registry files” file, disable – Shortcut text.reg, didn’t work for me. I right-clicked a video file, just to test it out, and when the new shortcut icon was created it still said “- shortcut” at the end. I then tried to do it manually as explained here, and changed the registry in the manner explained, but the “-shortcut” text is still appearing at the end of new shortcut icons. I did restart the Explorer Window, each time, but neither method worked. Ah well. Maybe the newly updated Windows 10 doesn’t allow it or something.

I’ve been using the Tweaker for a few years now, and wanted to point out that although I’ve applied most of the same tweaks to numerous Windows 10 Pro installations at this point, the tweak for disabling the “- Shortcut” filename text for newly created shortcuts has never worked for me. I’ve also followed your detailed instructions for editing the registry here, but for every installation I’ve done it on, the named registry key did not already exist, though the key did its job once I created it.

This worked for me on Windows 8.1 but fails on Windows 10. I restarted the computer after zeroing the “link” value to make sure that Explorer restarted. I can’t see any reason why this should not work on Win 10. Best of luck.